The Bradshaw Variations Page 7

  Claudia visits, sitting on the far edge of the bed. She, too, seems to feel the torpor, the heaviness in the atmosphere. He expects her to be familiar with it, but apparently she is not: she appears to believe it emanates from him.

  ‘How are you feeling now?’ she asks, brisk and enamel-eyed, scented, fully clothed. A little impatient, he senses, as though he were a piece of machinery that has broken down on her property and that she is keen to mend and move on its way.

  He folds back the rumpled covers and pats the sheets.

  ‘Do you want to come in?’

  ‘Into bed?’

  He touches her wrist. She looks alarmed.

  ‘There’s nobody here,’ he says.

  It is, he now sees, the problem with the day: it lacks the imposition of a human will. It is formless. It is a lump of clay which must be shaped by inspiration and desire. This, he recalls, is what freedom is. At forty-three freedom generally comes to him refined, in small quantities: decisions, directives, intricate opportunities for success. He has forgotten what the raw material feels like. Claudia fingers the silver pendant that hangs around her throat. He has seen it before but never noticed it, never noticed its cold compactness and the way it magnestises and draws her fingers to itself.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Come on, Claude. Just for a minute.’

  He has irritated her. He has made her angry. The black shapes of birds pass silently across the dun-coloured sky. Claudia lies beside him, somewhat stiffly, on the bed. She does not take off her shoes. But she rests her head in the crook of his arm so that he can stroke her hair, which is dirty-looking today and held back by numerous little silver clips. This is what amazes him, the way people give themselves, the way they create, in the emptiness of the coming moment, another instant of life. He hears it rising from the blankness of the street: the woman so patient with her child, the man whistling for his dog. He thinks how virtuous they are, how good. The winter trees make stark, cross-hatched shapes beyond the window. He doesn’t think people can ever be as good consciously as they are by instinct, on an empty street on a midweek morning in November. As his wife is, in this throwaway bit of the day, lying beside him on the bed.

  ‘Do you want anything?’ she says, when she is standing in the doorway again, straightening her clothes.

  ‘Just a little soup,’ he says weakly. ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘Soup,’ she says. ‘Any particular kind of soup?’

  ‘Whatever there is. The one you make with leeks is very nice. And perhaps a roll, just one, with some butter.’

  ‘Right,’ she says.

  He sees her look of resignation, of momentary oppression. Perhaps when he is at work she forgets all about him. What does she think about? What is he deflecting her from, stewing here in sheets that smell of himself, in their room that is becoming steeped in his own presence? She should air it, straighten the covers and open the windows, put flowers in a vase. Instead she straightens her own clothes, and looks slightly grim around the mouth when he asks for soup. In the window of the house opposite he can see a figure behind the dark glass. He sees a pale arm, lifting and moving, lifting and moving. He sees a dim fall of hair to a white shoulder. It is a woman ironing. He can see the metallic glint of the object, the pressure and repetition of her movement. Her face is in shadow. She is so steady, so industrious. He watches her, comforted. It is true that life lays a fetter on love: this, he thinks, may be Claudia’s secret. There is virtue in industry, even as it sets its limitations on affection, even as it stints the hand of feeling. It is good that Claudia doesn’t drop everything to lie beside him all day. He remembers the way his mother used to look after him when he was ill. There were always flowers in a glass by the bed, and a tray coming up the stairs. He remembers the feeling of paralysing love, the way she seemed to want to keep him there and he half-wanted to be kept, as though she had stolen him back from the world in order to perfect her care of him.

  He sleeps for a while, and when he wakes he can smell the soup from downstairs. The day is unchanged. The bird is calling at the window. Ree-ree-ree-ree-ree. The telephone rings and he hears Claudia speaking. She speaks for a long time. Several times she laughs. Later she brings up a tray and puts it beside him on the covers. It is a quarter past two: his mouth is dry and bitter-tasting with hunger. The soup is pale green, thick, flecked with herbs, just as he had imagined it would be.

  ‘Where’s yours?’ he says. ‘Aren’t you having any?’

  She is moving around, picking things up, keeping out of his reach.

  ‘I had mine earlier downstairs. I was hoping to get into the studio this afternoon. Have you got everything you need?’

  He remembers this too, the feeling of his mother’s secret life, and of himself as an interloper, eavesdropping on it; as though home were a trick, an artifice, and his illness the manifestation of his mother’s guilt. After she goes he eats the soup, imagining her sitting alone at the table downstairs, eating hers.

  X

  The house is empty. Olga moves through the rooms, looking at things. She is back early today, with a headache that sends big shivers all through her body. They let her go home. All the way on the bus the headache beat her, like a stick beating a drum. And then the driver shouted at her because she pressed the button too late, and he put the brakes on hard so that she was thrown against the rail. It hurt her: she has a red welt on her arm. Why did he do that to her? If she ever meets him again she will ask him. She has no friends here, no family, no language to express herself in. Why was it her he chose to hurt?

  She stands in the room with the velvet sofa, where she is never invited, where they sit in the evenings and talk. There are chairs, a leather one and another one with an old-fashioned flowery cover. There is a table all piled up with newspapers and magazines and two dirty glasses. There is a piano, old, brown-coloured. The curtains in this room are green. She likes the material, raw silk, and she likes the gold mirror above the fireplace and the things that stand on the mantelpiece, a little gold clock with tiny engraved pillars like a temple, a paperweight with a blood-coloured peony engulfed in the glass, a sky-blue china vase with a narrow neck. There are little white figures engraved on its sides. They are dressed in tunic-like clothes, like gods and goddesses. They are dancing and talking and feasting all the way around. She looks at the books, leaning higgledy-piggledy on the shelves. They are dusty, as the piano is. But the chairs and the sofa look friendly, like people talking, and the curtains make her think of the ball gowns actresses wear in old films. It is a good room, a warm room, but they never ask her to come in and sit down.

  She goes upstairs to their bedroom, dusty too, clothes everywhere, the bed unmade. One night she heard them shouting in here. She does not like people who shout. But in the morning they were normal again, as though nothing had happened. The bed is like a rat’s nest with the covers all tangled. It is strange, that two people would agree to leave it in that state. It is mysterious. She herself would refuse to get into that bed. She doesn’t understand why they don’t make their room nice. It is disgusting, to live like this. She opens a drawer, glances in. Men’s underclothes, neatly folded. She is surprised. He is so untidy, so lazy, and yet in his own drawer where no one can see, everything is in order. She has come home at three or four in the afternoon and found him lying on the sofa, reading a book, while downstairs the kitchen is full of terrible sights and smells, flies buzzing around the dirty plates, the unswept floor crunching underfoot, pans with burnt food at the bottom left sitting there for days. She would never have guessed that he folded his underpants.

  In her own room everything is clean and orderly. The white winter sun is coming through the window. There is a bluebottle swimming noisily at the glass. She swats it dead with a rolled-up magazine. The headache has left a hollow behind it. She touches the red mark on her arm with her fingertips. She feels lonely. She sits on her bed and dials her mother’s number.

  XI

  The piano teacher live
s with his boyfriend in a basement flat on the other side of town. Ignatius is a pianist too: his grand is wedged into the cramped bedroom while Benjamin’s upright occupies the living area, where brown damp stains spot the low, sagging ceiling, and the window looks out onto a small concrete courtyard and a flight of mildewed steps up to the street.

  Even before he arrives, Thomas feels the atmosphere begin to act on his attitude to culture like astringent on a raw wound: the rows of run-down houses, the pavements piled with broken furniture and bloated sacks of rubbish, the rusted railings and bright venomous green of Benjamin’s stairway, even the chipped front door, low like the door to a dungeon – it is all bracing, corrective, so that when the door opens and Benjamin appears, Thomas feels a confusing, lover-like rush of sensation towards him. Benjamin is not especially beautiful: it is just that in the squalor of his own hallway, his clean humanity is momentarily overwhelming. Thomas is slightly ashamed of the pleasure it gives him to look at Benjamin’s milk-coloured skin, so restful to the eyes; at his hair, which is black and glossy, and at his pink mouth, with its choirboy’s expression of faint astonishment. His body suggests itself through his unexceptional cardigan and corduroys like a statue through a dust sheet. Lately Thomas has come to realise, as they face each other in the doorway, that Benjamin is pleased to see him too. A feeling of warmth, almost of excitement, is shed in the space between their irreconcilable bodies.

  Thomas offers his hand – ‘Hello again’ – and after a brief hesitation Benjamin takes it, so that he wonders whether, in fact, Benjamin finds something awkward in the male handshake, something quaintly heterosexual. It occurs to him that gay men perhaps do not shake hands, that they hug or kiss each other’s cheeks like women do. He wonders whether, next time, he will offer to hug Benjamin.

  ‘Nice to see you,’ Benjamin says, pressing his fingers and then releasing them.

  They enter the hall, where torn pieces of brown vinyl skid underfoot and a single electric bulb hangs from a length of dirty flex. Benjamin has to duck his head to avoid hitting it. He rounds the corner, ducks again at the door to the lavishly untidy sitting room. Thomas follows him in, so closely that the pile of Benjamin’s fawn cardigan is only inches from his eyes, for there is no possibility of distance in the cramped, warren-like flat and as a consequence the human form seems more significant, more textured, denser with association. Along with its squalor, it is this that causes Thomas to identify Benjamin’s flat with youth. When he comes here he is reminded of a closer and more sensually vivid experience of the body that he did not realise, until now, he had forsaken. Sitting with Benjamin at the piano, their knees nearly touching, their hands crossing and recrossing as they explore the keys, Thomas is more physically proximate than he has been for years to anyone but his wife and child. Benjamin’s chair is a wooden schoolroom chair that creaks whenever he leans forward to turn the pages or to demonstrate something on the keys. His limbs graze Thomas’s field of vision, the legs and arms so rod-like and mathematical on their big knuckle-like hinges, the expert, spacious hands with their broad, clean nails, the firm male wrists and the vigorous brown hair of his forearm that is disclosed when he reaches up for the metronome: this is intimacy, this nearness that is always renewing itself through movement. It is hard to impress someone who is sitting so close. It has taken Thomas time to get used to the fact that it is through his hands and not his face that the impression must be produced.

  Benjamin observes him unblinking behind his glasses.

  ‘How has it been this week?’

  ‘Good, I think. Fine.’

  The first time, Thomas was flustered by this question, which seemed to press at some unexposed part of himself – to be somehow clinical, like a doctor’s examination of hidden regions of the body. He sought to cover himself up; he tried to re-establish in words the sense of distance he could not accomplish physically. But now he is used to the exposure. He looks forward to the acknowledgement of it, this patch cleared of shame where now, week by week, he cultivates himself.

  ‘You’ve kept on with the two-part invention.’

  ‘Actually,’ Thomas says nonchalantly, ‘I’ve started looking at the adagio.’

  Benjamin arches his narrow brows. ‘The Beethoven?’

  Thomas nods. He can see that Benjamin is surprised, a surprise that is faintly sceptical, so that Thomas’s heart is made to thud against his breastbone. He knows what is coming next. The fact is that unlike nearly every other aspect of his adult life, there is no getting around a claim to have learnt to play the adagio. It cannot be explained, or deferred, or talked away. He has to show that he can do it.

  ‘Do you have the music with you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right, then.’

  Benjamin rises, picks up his chair. He wades through the sheaves of manuscript paper that litter the filthy carpet and establishes himself three or four feet away, hands clasped attentively in his lap. His scepticism has evaporated: his brow is once more unclouded and eager. This is, after all, no place for scepticism. What would be the point of it? Thomas, when he watches Alexa carry her plate precariously to the sink, or observes Tonie reversing the car into a parking space, feels scepticism, doubt; he feels the world teetering just beyond his reach, like some toppling object he wants to grasp firmly and set squarely on its feet again. But Benjamin, apparently, will feel no such unease watching Thomas. Does he think it isn’t important, how Thomas plays the adagio? Has he decided that since Thomas’s performance represents no practical gain or loss to himself he may as well be indifferent to it? Benjamin inclines his head towards the piano. It is a courtly gesture: Thomas imagines himself inclining his head to Alexa, to Tonie, as they teeter on the brink of disaster. It signifies that Benjamin has left the field, the keyboard that sometimes seems to grin like a set of teeth and sometimes to glimmer like a far-off frozen landscape, a place as beautiful as it is inhuman, whose silence is occasionally interrupted by the sounds of struggle before swallowing them up again.

  Benjamin clears his throat: ‘When you’re ready.’

  The truth is that for the past week Thomas has worked on the adagio like a solitary prisoner tunnelling under the fortress walls. He is slightly ashamed of it, his secret determination, the rigidity of his methods, the insistent, repetitive labour he has put into it, for this is how he has always got the things he wanted in life, and how he has got the better of what he didn’t want too. It has felt like cheating, just as it did when he studied all night to pass an exam, or got through the tedium of meetings by knowing more than anyone else, or planned down to the last detail his strategy for attracting the attention of a woman he liked. It has always seemed that work occupied the place where something more natural ought to have been, something instinctive and innate, something he associates with honesty, though he doesn’t know exactly why. Sitting at the piano, he has felt sure that there is a more honest way of learning the adagio than to play each bar until its sanity has been broken down and become a rattling box of madness, but he has been unable to think of what it might be. He has felt a fleeting, bitter discouragement, even as his fingers were fumbling with and then tentatively mastering the music, for his decision to learn an instrument contains a nameless hope that seems to be being confounded before his eyes. He imagined, secretly, a kind of abandon awaiting him somewhere within its discipline; imagined himself freed, untethered by it to wander in great white fields of self-expression. But all that has happened is that ever-larger distances of method and minutiae have been disclosed that have turned the screws of his personality even tighter.

  ‘As I say, I’ve barely even scratched the surface,’ he says to Benjamin. ‘It’s hard to find the time. You know how it is.’

  Benjamin inclines his head again, smiling.

  ‘Well, here goes,’ Thomas says.

  For an instant his mind is filled with the white light of performance, the strange featureless lucidity left behind by the knowledge that he mustn’t think, that his brain mus
t be vacated, that instead he must act; and the next time he checks, he sees that he is already halfway down the first page, and the thinking makes him falter so he quickly vacates his brain again and returns to his hands. There is an awful passage that is like inching along a narrow ledge, and then a period when he seems to be safe in miles of firm level ground; then suddenly it is a cataract, a rushing to the edge, to disaster, and over he goes, swept down through the complexity and out the other side, where there is stillness and daylight and the untidy room with Benjamin sitting in his chair.

  ‘Bravo!’ Benjamin says, very flushed and astonished-looking.

  The bedroom door flies open. It is Ignatius, as ruddy and squat and prodigiously hairy as Benjamin is slender and marmoreal. He stands in the doorway, applauding and exclaiming loudly, in his plush American that makes everything sound pleasanter and less sincere than usual. Then he advances into the room, cheerful and cocky-looking in his tight T-shirt, chest hair foaming at his throat, trousers straining around his haunches, a little reddish-blond tuft of beard sprouting from his chin. Benjamin is looking slightly pinched around the mouth.

  ‘That adagio is just divine – I had no idea you’d got so important! I had my ear to the door, thinking who can that possibly be in there?’

  ‘I can’t play the other movements,’ Thomas says apologetically, though his face is red with pleasure. Ignatius is a real pianist, not a teacher but a performer, whose name can be seen on flyers for lunchtime recitals at the Wigmore Hall. He is ashamed of his disloyalty to Benjamin: vaguely he understands that it is their intimacy that causes him to feel ashamed. Usually, only Tonie can constrain him in this way, web him finely with the knowledge of herself, so that he feels clumsy, tearing the gossamer threads.